Happy Birthday, Melissa Etheridge! The musician and cancer survivor turns 48 today. An Oscar and Grammy Award winning singer, Etheridge is best known for her blend of pop-infused folk rock and gay rights activism.

In 2004 Etheridge was diagnosed with breast cancer. She learned she had been nominated for a Grammy award in the midst of chemotherapy. Since cancer treatment sometimes impaired her ability to move and speak, she had decided not to attend the ceremony. But when she was invited to sing in a Janis Joplin tribute, she knew she had to go. “I knew that my own adrenaline could absolutely carry me through for two and a half minutes,” she said in an interview with Dateline NBC. “I knew I could do it. And I wanted to do it.”

Watch Etheridge and Joss Stone perform Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” at the 2005 Grammy Awards. Click here to read more on Etheridge.

This week Jim from over at Sweet Juniper told the story of his father-in-law Doug’s battle with cancer. Doug died just a few days before his 62nd birthday. That was a blessed 10 months after Jim and his wife had been told Doug only had 2 weeks to live.

Stories like Doug’s are a reminder to celebrate all life has to offer, and they are the reason why the American Cancer Society works every day to create a world with less cancer and more birthdays so cancer can’t steal another year from anyone’s life. Read the story below:

The American Cancer Society recently asked my wife and I to write about how cancer has affected our lives in conjunction with their campaign to raise awareness about the good that this organization has been doing for 96 years. Although anyone reading this site for a while knows about the loss of my wife’s beloved stepfather over a year ago, we haven’t written about it much here. We are taking this opportunity to do so, knowing that so many others have similar stories, with hope that one day even the battles that were lost will be remembered for helping us get to a place where many more are won.

My son was in the kitchen, digging through the cupboards for his beloved pots and pans, when I heard him dump a giant bin of spices on the ground. Upon investigation, I saw that one of the canisters had spilled all over his feet and the floor, giving his white socks an ocher hue and the familiar smell of Doug’s cooking filled the air. Doug was an amazing cook: a man willing to rise every morning before my wife went off to high school to make her pancakes, a man who patiently waited for her (and me) to shed our fickle, teenage palates and expose us to real food. Real cooking with real ingredients that we in our provincial lives had never experienced. From fois gras to phở, Doug was our link to a world of food that involved more than sandwiches wrapped in paper or casseroles that stuck like spackle to your ribs. He was an epicure who once opened his own restaurant. Before he got sick, Doug printed and bound a book of his own recipes and gave it to us with a huge supply of his homemade seasoning, a secret concoction of his favorite spices that we used on potatoes and grilled meat and fish. And then there it was: dumped unceremoniously on the kitchen floor. I stared at it as my child wandered away leaving a trail of dust, a comet of cayenne.

It’s been over a year, I thought. How can we still have his spice – cook with it even – but he is gone? I wanted to scoop it up with my hands, but instead I vacuumed up the secret seasoning, acutely feeling the loss of him, the emptiness now occupying the space he’d held in our lives, disappearing like the dust at my feet. In my mother-in-law’s freezer there are still a dozen or so Tupperware containers packed tight with meals he cooked, the frozen slivers of onions he chopped with his own hands mingling with tomatoes he gently inspected in his palm at the market. How can this food still be here, when we’ve been without him for so long? She will not eat this food, even if it means letting it all go to waste. She still needs it in there, taking up that space. His closet is still full of his clothes on their hangers. He died while we were on our way to visit him, and I had to borrow a pair of his nice shoes for the funeral.

* * * * *

Initially they told him it was probably nothing; heartburn, perhaps, a diagnosis the bumbling staff at the small hospital probably makes by default at the tail end of the holidays. When the pain in his leg persisted they thought it might be a blood clot. They still sent him home. Days later, when the pain moved to his right arm a battery of tests showed it to be the unwelcome diagnosis that sent everyone scurrying to google adult leukemia, disbelieving that a man who’d been so healthy and robust for the holidays a week earlier could suddenly be associated with that word.

A cancer diagnosis isn’t what it used to be. There are so many survivors, both high-profile people and those you know in your every day life. When we heard the word cancer our minds started whirring with thoughts of everyone we’ve known who had fought that battle. I thought of my college roommate who’d lost his father to inoperable brain cancer during our junior year and then, years later, watched his own wife fight and defeat breast cancer while still in her twenties. Doug’s diagnosis seemed as grim as could be, at least according to the merciless bedside manner of Dr. Google. Doug had Acute Myelogeneous Leukemia. There was no surgery that could be performed, no cancerous growth to be removed and compared to something you’d find in the produce aisle. This was an enemy hiding in his bone marrow and blood. We were told up front that things were really bad and that he probably only had a couple of weeks. Just like that, it went from a blood clot to two weeks to live. Everything we found on the web reaffirmed that hopes were dim. Even with the most aggressive treatments, less than 15 percent of those diagnosed with this brutal cancer survive more than five years, and we speculated about where he fit in the spectrum of more risky prognostic markers, grasping for anything that sounded remotely positive and secretly despairing at everything else.

Doug refused to believe he would only live for a couple weeks. He immediately agreed to pursue the most aggressive treatment and he was in chemotherapy within a matter of hours after the diagnosis.

For every story of stunning triumph, there are still plenty of staggering losses. That Doug did not survive his battle does not mean his story contains no hope. When you think someone you love only has two weeks left, every day beyond that is another day you didn’t think you’d have with them; as days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months, despite the ravages of chemotherapy, the doctors were able to give him time. Time to read his granddaughter book after book in the crook of his arm on his hospital bed, on his couch at home. They gave him time to learn that he had a grandson who would be born the following winter, time to see him swell in my wife’s belly. They gave him many hours to visit and laugh with good friends. They gave him one more summer with the woman he loved most in the world. There was time to peel back the cellophane on some terrible meals, and time in his own kitchen to cook a few great ones. There was time to think about his life, time to sit with travel books and dream of a trip to Italy with his wife, a trip that never worked out because of the aggressive chemotherapy schedule, but it was a vision that helped get him through the hardest days.

The doctors who led Doug through this battle were warriors who’d seen it time and time again, though they never gave the impression that this disease wasn’t something they could destroy in him. Doug was an electrical engineer and a unabashed computer nerd who found great comfort in charting his own progress with spreadsheets and graphs, rising and falling counts of white blood cells, hemoglobin, and platelets all of which resembled the emotional roller coaster that he and his wife described in those precarious days of treatment that followed fevers and infections but led to the possibility of a bone marrow transplant. His own scientific background helped lead Doug to a dizzying understanding of the drugs that were killing the leukemic blast cells in his bone marrow. Instead of having a patient’s eyes glaze over while they described a new “gemtuzumab ozogamicin” and how it might affect “basal metabolic organ functions,” the oncologists and hematologists found Doug to be a fascinated patient who held as much hope and confidence in the science as they did, often following up by reading the latest research on his laptop from the hospital bed during treatment.

To the doctors and the patient, this fight was always worth it. Hope was never fruitless. The chemo tore him down time and time again, but he fought on. Every night was another to spend with his wife at his side, while the night nurses looked the other way when she climbed up into the bed to hold him. Every day brought new messages of support and love from all around the country on his CarePage. Even at the peak of chemo side effects, Doug wrote about how wonderful a particular summer day felt on his skin.

There was a brief remission. There was the discovery of a perfect bone marrow match and a willing donor. But as preparations for the bone marrow aspiration progressed in Ann Arbor, even when hope was strongest, everything suddenly took a turn for the worse. Doug suffered a stroke and died just days before his 62nd birthday: 10 grueling, blessed months after they first told us he might only have two weeks to live.

* * * * *

It’s not my place to talk about grief. My mother-in-law still cries every day. She walks the [American Cancer Society] Relay For Life, still keeps in touch with the doctors and the nurses who tended her husband through those months, and attends gatherings of survivors and those who lost loved ones on the same floor where her husband died.

I’ll go whole days where I don’t think about those months, days filled with petty worries and trivialities. Then, in the kitchen, I’ll see his cookbook on the shelf, and remember all the time he’d spend on food, all the meals we ate with him. I’ll remember the advice he gave during those final months. Go outside if it’s warm. Hug your loved ones. Enjoy a good meal.

And then sometimes I’ll take his cookbook down from the shelf, and start thumbing through the pages.

Thank you Jim for sharing the story of Doug’s battle with cancer. Help create a world with less cancer and more birthdays today by visiting morebirthdays.com.

This week’s Theme Thursday post was submitted by party planning expert Lisa Kothari over at Peppers & Pollywogs. Lisa is a big fan of the More Birthdays movement and below she’s got some tips on how you can celebrate your baby’s birthday in style.

The classic rubber ducky makes a darling first birthday party theme for one-year-olds! Looking for some ducky fun?

If you are planning on hand delivering your invitations, give your guests little rubber duckies with tags attached that provide all of your party details. You can also write this information directly on the rubber duckies.

Your party decorations can be any colors that you like, but yellow most certainly should be one of them. You may also want to use blue and white (for water). Buy balloons and streamers in your color scheme and hang them all over the party area. You could also buy a rubber ducky Mylar balloon for the birthday kid’s special seat!

Set the table in your chosen colors, and mix them up. For instance, you could have a blue tablecloth and yellow plates. Place rubber duckies all over the table as well. If you have one large rubber ducky, place it in the middle, and tie two or three balloons to the ducky for added festivity.

Purchase a bubble machine and have it blowing bubbles at the front entryway of the party for everyone to walk through; move the bubble machine around as needed. You could also hang a plain shower curtain at the front entrance that the guests must pass through to get into the party area. This would be fun.

Make sure to have party music playing, such as the “Rubber Ducky” theme from Sesame Street and “Splish Splash, I was taking a Bath.” This will get your guests in rubber ducky mood.

If older kids are attending, have them do a craft when they arrive. They can make rubber ducky hats or rubber ducky puppets. For the hats, provide the kids with plain sun visors and have them use googly eyes, markers, and stickers to create their ducks. For the puppets, give the kids yellow or orange socks and googly eyes, foam beaks, and feathers for decoration.

Have the kids make Play-Doh rubber duckies out of a mound of yellow dough. Also have a few additional colors on hand, such as orange and red.

For games, play Rubber, Rubber, Ducky as you would Duck, Duck, Goose. Also play Pin the Bill on the Ducky.

For the food, buy a rubber ducky cookie cutter, and cut all of the food out in this shape. You can make rubber ducky sandwiches, sugar cookies (the kids can decorate these!), and gelatin ducks. Serve little dry cereal snacks and call them “duck feed.” Put the duck feed into little silver buckets, and have the kids can eat it out of these little pails.

For favors, send the kids home with little plastic pails filled with bath time fun: little bath bubbles, bath confetti, miniature washcloths that expand with water, little bars of soap, bottles of bubbles, and small rubber duckies. For babies, a soft rubber ducky bath toy would be a great choice.

Lisa Kothari is the founder and president of Peppers and Pollywogs, a kids’ party planning company that provides parents with ideas, entertainers, and interesting web-based tools (customized rhymes and cards for your invitations!) to make kids’ party planning easy. She has recently written and published Dear Peppers and Pollywogs…What Parents Want To Know About Planning Their Kids’ Parties which is available at Amazon.com and Peppers and Pollywogs.

Thanks Lisa, for the great birthday theme advice!

Here at the Official Birthday Blog we like to remember that one person with a big heart can have a big impact. When Marilyn Pritchard of Elm Grove, Wisconsin, read about a program that delivered birthday cakes to people in shelters in New York, she recruited her friend Mary McNulty to help her do the same thing in Wisconsin.

This inspiring tale is a reminder of how every birthday is a victory. Columnist Nancy Stohs writes about this moving story here. We’ve summarized it below for you:

Ten years ago, Marilyn Pritchard started delivering cakes to a group of people who can’t take birthday celebrations for granted: women and children housed in shelters for battered women.

In a decade, she and other volunteers have baked, donated, and delivered upward of 800 cakes to residents of women’s centers and domestic abuse shelters in the Waukesha and Milwaukee areas.

“Sometimes, this is the first homemade cake they’ve ever had, or the first birthday cake they’ve ever had,” said Pritchard of the cake recipients.

That’s true for the women as well as the kids. McNulty once delivered a cake to a 60-year-old woman — it was the first cake anyone had ever baked for her.

None of the 30-plus volunteers is expected to be an expert baker or decorator.

“I always tell the bakers, bake like you would for your own child, your niece or nephews, don’t get nervous about it. That’s all these people expect,” says McNulty. “I shouldn’t say expect — they don’t expect anything. They’re happy with whatever you do.”

“Happy Birthday” is a victory song, and the American Cancer Society wants to create a world with more birthdays — where cancer never steals another year from anyone’s life. To learn how you can help create more birthdays, visit MoreBirthdays.com.

A beautifully wrapped present is part of the magic of birthdays. But during a time when there’s a shortage of financial and environmental resources, here are some tips for smart ways to package your next birthday present:

1. Wrap your gift in a gift. One of the simplest ways to keep your wrapping from going to waste is to make it part of the birthday present. A hand-knit scarf, decorative bandanna, or beautiful handkerchief, are perfect materials for wrapping a gift in a gift.

2. Construct boxes out of old cards. If you’re a crafts person, try putting some of your old cards to use. A little bit of cutting, folding, and gluing can turn those old birthday cards from your aunt into a beautiful birthday box! Here’s how.

3. Arrange your birthday present in a gift basket. Gift baskets can be an artful alternative to traditional wrapping. Find one made from natural materials that suits the size of your gift. The basket can be used throughout the year to hold fruit, vegetables, napkins, or anything the recipient chooses.

4. Wrap birthday gifts in a stylish shopping bag. Pretty shopping bags with some colorful, recycled tissue paper are a good way to reuse materials. And brown paper grocery bags can make an exquisite wrapping with a little thought and effort.

5. Substitute postcards for birthday cards that require envelopes. Use a postcard. Postcards are less expensive than cards and generally require about a fourth as much paper as regular cards. A postcard can give your present a unique feel, and is the perfect touch for a birthday present that’s a planned trip or excursion.

6. Use Old Maps. For an antique feel, wrap your presents in old maps. Maps, especially road maps, can become obsolete if you’re moving or buying a GPS system, but they never loose their visual intrigue. If your present is from a place that you’ve traveled, try using one of your old tourists maps to wrap the present for a look that’s authentic.

7. Use a Vintage Tin. Old tins are a fun way to package birthday presents. A decorative tin is so pretty you don’t need wrapping paper, and they are useful long-term as a place to store accessories or goodies. For a celebratory feel, add a homemade, pom-pom bow by following these easy steps.

Got a better idea for how to wrap your next birthday present? Tell us about it in the comments below!